Inconvenient

Shinagawa, Tokyo (photo: Seiya Ishibashi)

Convenience Store Woman
(Konbini Ningen) by Sayaka Murata,
translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Granta Books, 2019 (2016).

Quirky. Hilarious. Weird. Funny. Comical. Cute. Dreamy. Just some of the adjectives from press reviews littering the cover of the edition I read of Sayaka Murata’s Konbini Ningen. Yet, strangely, these wouldn’t have been the words I’d’ve used, which perhaps only goes to show that I’m an atypical reader.

Sad. Affirmative. Blistering. Honest. Critical. Familiar. Unconventional. These are the terms that come to my mind after having completed this first-person novella of a woman in her thirties who works part-time in a Japanese convenience store. Not a trace of dreaminess, quirkiness or real comedy did I detect. It really matters who’s in the audience for this little drama.

For the fact of the matter is that Keiko Furukura doesn’t fit the norm of a woman approaching middle age in Japanese society; and her attempts to fit in as best she can lead to rather mixed results. Can she – or rather should she – be “fixed” or “cured” of her thinking and behaviours? That’s the crux of this thought-provoking piece of what one might class as autobiografiction.

Tokyo at night: WordPress Free Photo Library

For the last eighteen years, since the age of 18 in fact, Keiko has been working part-time at a convenience store near Hiiromachi Station in Shinagawa, Tokyo. She likes the familiar sounds, the routine, the well-defined rules around promotions, the rituals around greeting and interacting with customers. Other staff may come and go but she is a steadfast rock in what is at times a turbulent environment.

But troubles assail her, even though she tries to appear “normal” by working well at her job and by masking her nature through taking on the speech and behavioural tics of her colleagues. It is her nature that flummoxes her family and acquaintances: her apparent lack of emotion in certain circumstances, her frank statements that bypass accepted habits of dissembling, above all her lack of interest in sex, getting married and settling into the role of housewife. After all, she is in her late thirties, only in a part-time job, and not fulfilling societal expectations…

And not only are they flummoxed: they actively try to interfere, especially her family who feel they have made allowances for her eccentricities for all her life and who think she should now learn to conform. Their opportunity comes when she gives space in her crowded flat to an ex-employee at the store who proved temperamentally unable to fulfil his duties: he may be a means to render the convenience store worker less of an inconvenience for their norms of what is acceptable.

I found Convenience Store Woman an unusual and yet very familiar portrait of a woman on the autistic spectrum, all the more so for Keiko’s condition never being identified as such, if indeed it was ever intended to be depicted thus by the author. Sayaka  Murata has clearly drawn on her own life as a part-time convenience store worker, a job that has allowed her – and continues to allow her – to pursue a career as a successful writer. It would be an ideal arrangement for some on the spectrum who wanted a steady income from a not too demanding occupation while having a creative outlet.

But still, this novella wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t an absorbing story, and for me this certainly was engaging, partly due to Ginny Tapley Takemori’s unintrusive translation. As a protagonist recounting her own experiences Keiko is blessed with a distinct personality, one which successfully draws the reader into her own world and ways of thinking. And author Sayaka Murata’s voice is certainly one which I would like to encounter again.

Sayaka Murata (photo: New York Times)

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